IEA EBC Annex 81 – Data-Driven Smart Buildings: Building-to-Grid Applications

Within the IEA EBC Annex 81 – “data-driven smart buildings”, the sub-task C3 – “Building-to-Grid (B2G) applications” focuses on developing an online platform to gather, evaluate, compare, present and promote concrete cases in which a building or cluster of buildings provide service to the energy grid such as demand response (DR). To that end, the sub-task addresses some important research gaps such as context, definitions and key performance indicators (KPIs) for building energy flexibility (EF) assessment and the heterogeneity of data representations in datasets of B2G services. It provides an overview of the data-driven KPIs for EF assessment, discusses open datasets of buildings performing DR, and proposes a framework to standardize KPIs’ definition and dataset collection. This framework uses semantic principles and a Python package to harmonize required and available data from KPIs and B2G datasets. It thus streamlines the computation of EF assessments, which are implemented in an online platform. This paper presents the results, conclusions and perspectives on B2G applications that can be drawn from sub-task C3.